Five Gifts Anders Didn't Want To Accept, And One He Gladly Did
by Kayt
Summary: Hawke's a giver. His gifts? Well, the intentions are good, even if they are badly chosen, badly made, badly delivered, or some awful combination of all three. This is more or less shameless m!Hawke/Anders fluff in the classic five times and one time format, spanning the length of Dragon Age II.
1. Chapter 1: A Box Of Odds And Ends

**Chapter 1. A Box of Odds And Ends**

"Healer! Anders!" Mirana's angry, that much is clear. Not afraid, though. Even so, it's an effort to choke back the surge within him, the tingle at his fingertips. Not now. It'll upset the patients. Already has, if the round-eyed look the elderly man beneath his hands gives him is anything to go by. "Wait, please," he murmurs, calm as he can. Like as not the man will flee before he returns and reap an infection in that leg for his troubles.

He crosses the crowded clinic floor quick as he can, which is not particularly quick in the end. It's a bad day, a crowded day, the noises and smells of suffering doing nobody any good. And there's a thief on his hands, like as not. He knows that tone. Mirana's still new enough to be frustrated by it. She'll learn. Of course people will try to take what they can, here where it would be freely given. How can they do otherwise, when kindness has been as scarce as anything else needed to sustain life?

Mirana's prisoner has a familiar face, for all that cocksure grin has a distinctly sheepish tinge to it. Well. It seems he has the capacity to be disappointed after all. "Hawke?"

"You know this one?" Mirana prods Hawke's side, none too gently. "Found him lurking around the cellars."

"I know him," and Maker, he sounds tired. He _feels_ tired. He would have thought to call Hawke friend.

Hawke reaches back to scratch at his neck. "Don't suppose you'd believe I was in the neighborhood?"

The back of his neck prickles. Anders half-turns, and sure enough, old Messere Wrenchwright is stirring ominously. "Look to the leg injury in cot seventeen, will you, Mirana?" She gives him a flat look and treats Hawke to another stab of her bony fingers, but she goes.

He turns back to his unlikely thief, and Hawke very nearly shuffles his feet. Good. "I thought I'd bring some things by, is all," and he's still smiling. The nerve of him. "And, well, you looked busy so I thought, I'll just leave them in the storeroom, no need to cause a disturbance." He probably thinks that smirk is charming. "So much for that."

Anders scrapes his eyes up and down. No obvious bulges, no suspicious pouches at his belt. Whatever he's lifted, it isn't much. He'd been kind, so kind, that night with Karl. Anders can spare him the lecture, at least, even if he hasn't got the energy for false niceties with the weight of the day and this unexpected disappointment heavy in his gut.

The silence stretches. Hawke's smile strains, a little. "Maybe I'd better…" He waves vaguely at the door.

"You'd better," Anders confirms, and then startles when the man has the nerve to clap him on the shoulder on the way out.

There's so much work to do, so much need, that he can keep the bitter weight of their interaction out of his mind for the rest of the afternoon. Finally it's as quiet as it's going to get. Better to get it over with, down to the cellars, see how bad the damage is.

He counts the potions, twice, just to be sure. The numbers add up. He's about to go in for a third when his boot snags on a box, tucked just beside the elfroot stores, where it has no business being.

The box itself has clearly seen better days, suspicious stains better not investigated closely. Anders gives it a kick and nothing moves. Small mercies. Still, he's a little leery of digging around in it. The rats are industrious and feisty this close to the sewers. Strange - there's trousers, many pairs. They've seen better days, too, but the obvious tears in them have been skillfully mended. His fingers catch on something round toward the bottom. Whatever it is, it's been carefully wrapped. He unwinds the trousers and - it can't be. Lyrium, five flasks. There are more suspicious lumps in the very bottom of the box. He shakes out the last pair of trousers and - carrots, only just rubbery, six, no, seven of them, and a couple of onions. Just his luck - a greasy scrap of parchment shoved in the bottom of the box slices into a finger. There's just enough life left in his candle to look at the thing. A letter, it seems, the words carefully crossed out. Anders flips the paper and there's a message on the other side, the spiky handwriting nearly unreadable. "Wicked Grace, Hanged Man, tomorrow, 10th bell. Come if you have the time. Hawke."

Hawke. The laugh that wrenches out of him is not a pleasant one. Andraste's ample ass, he'd been a knob. Oh, Hawke had a hand in it, too, all guilty faces and sneaking about. Although that's his doing, too, isn't it - he'd never have accepted this and Hawke knows it, too. This is too much. For all Hawke is doing all right for himself, he's got a whole family up in Lowtown and precious little coin that he clearly gets the hard way. The trousers, sure - better patched than none at all, and Maker knows some of his patients could use a new warm pair. But this much lyrium, and real vegetables to boot…

Well. It's not so strange, is it, that a recent refugee would spare a thought for his less able fellows? There's desperation here, but kindness, breathtaking kindness, too. He sees it every day. It always warms him - people who have so little who help in the small ways they can. The rush of warmth that runs through him now, eroding the fatigue of the day, it's no different.

Anders tucks the note into a pocket. Cards, eh? Been a good long while, but he owes Hawke some company at the very least, after the reception he gave him today. It's a waste of time, frivolous, but it's not right to turn a helping hand away so roughly.


	2. Chapter 2: A Whittled Kitten

**Chapter 2: A Whittled Kitten**

There's no way to get clean in the thrice-blasted Deep Roads. Can't trust the standing water, even if he was inclined to fight through iridescent scum thicker even than the sludge that comes out of the pumps in Darktown half the time, and no one's carrying enough water to waste on a proper scrub, not when he and Hawke together can barely conjure enough to meet drinking needs. He's reduced to halfheartedly wetting his hair when the itch is too much to be borne.

He passes Carver, ludicrously oversized sword thumping away like the air has personally wronged him. He thinks Anders has, if that sour look is anything to go by. Ugh. Joy of joys - the man will be even more rank, although at this point it's academic. No matter how pointed the distance Carver places between his bedroll and Hawke's, the odor carries, somehow distinct even over and above the general funk of unwashed dwarf. Just another gift from this forsaken place to round out the set. The constant awareness of closed space, thick looming slabs rock and nowhere worth running to, the constant skitter-screech of Darkspawn in his head, loud enough at night and Justice can't or won't block it when they're down here. Lovely.

And there's the man himself, sitting splayed down in the dirt with a boulder at his back, face scrunched up the way it does when he really concentrates on something and thinks no one's watching, fingers glowing faintly around some small object. "Trying to put Bodahn's boy out of business?" he says and Hawke yelps and drops the thing. Anders can't help but snicker at him, just a little, and earns himself a wry little grin.

Hawke scoops whatever it is up and gives it a critical look. "We'll call that added character," he says, and flips the thing over to Anders. "Unless, of course, Pouncey Cat had a scar all down his face, in which case we'll call it artistic accuracy."

"Pouncey Cat?" and sure enough, now that he looks at the thing, it's a rough-hewn little cat figurine with lumpy little legs and jaunty ears.

"This expedition is feline-friendly, unlike your last trip down here, I gather," and Hawke wears that carefully open look he gets when he's trying to draw someone out. Much better to look at the little wooden thing, take one breath, two. His fingers itch, the urge to bury them in his pauldrons sudden and sharp and no substitute for Ser Pounce-a-lot's warm fur and little heaving breaths. His living warmth and contrary quirks had been the only thing kept Anders sane down here, once upon a time, and the lack is damn near unbearable for a moment. The warmth washing over him - Hawke, Hawke remembering the story of his little demonspawn cat, maybe he pays as much mind to Anders as Anders does to him as though that is remotely possible - is no better, torture in its own way.

Deflect, deflect, deflect. "How did you do it?" he tries, waving the wooden cat, and his tone is light enough, thank the Maker for small mercies.

Hawke shrugs. "Just a bit of whittling," and he passes his hand over another bit of wood close to hand, peeling away a little curl of it. He still his fidgeting, just for a moment. "Father always had us at it. Taught precision, he said, but I think he was just trying to keep us out of mischief."

The urge to clasp one of Hawke's slightly slumped shoulders is as strong as it is unwise. "Well, that was a lost cause."

Hawke's chuckle is just a little flat. "Thought he picked it up in the Circle, actually," and there's that I'm-listening face again.

"Idle use of magic was not encouraged," and that was harsher than he'd meant to be.

"I would've thought that's exactly why you'd do it," and he swallows down a lecture on the stress and the fear, the constant threats of punishment and ever-present calculation, battles he could afford to pick and ones that weren't worth the stripes and the time in isolation, wrongwrongwrongwrong _wrong_ because Hawke knows, he knows, and the half-haunted look he gets when he talks about his life before, running and hiding and the profound, stupid, waste and loss of it… Unjust, all of it.

The hand wrapped around his own is a shock. "Careful," Hawke murmurs, and squeezes Anders' hand, crushed tight around the wooden cat. "You'll break my masterpiece and then where will we be?"

Exactly where they are now, days from the surface in the bloody Deep Roads, and this closeness, these feelings, they're as bad for him as everything else down here. He'd like to make a quip, something, diffuse that terrible warm understanding written all over Hawke's face in some way but he doesn't trust his tongue just now. "Thank you for this," he manages, and drops his eyes. "Think I'll call it an early night."

"Sleep well," Hawke says, and drops his hand. Anders misses it immediately, because he's a fool. Nothing good happens in the bloody Deep Roads. _Nothing._


End file.
